Owner's Manual: Effort by the Numbers

Isn’t it great that our sport doesn’t need human judges? No need for us to worry about "artistic" merit, no one around taking off points for our form. All we’ve got to do is just put low numbers on the objective, non-partisan, incorruptible clock. Best is least. But can we really tell when a better time is our personal best? It kind of has to be a subjective, hopefully honest, evaluation of our conscience, doesn’t it? We ask ourselves, "Was I mentally tough enough today to push through that painful fatigue barrier to my all-out, 100 percent, drop-dead-at-the-finish-line level of exhaustion?" Can you trust your internal, subjective judge of effort?

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Fortunately, there is an objective way to make wise, old "Judge Effort" better at telling the truth. You can clock not only the speed of your legs, but also the speed of your heart. This can be as simple as using your fingers and your reliable running watch. It will take a little practice to quickly locate and palpate your carotid artery for six seconds, but it’s an easily mastered skill that doesn’t require a medical degree. And if you just count for six seconds, you also don’t have to be a math major to find your beats per minute (bpm); just attach a zero to your six-second count. Or, you can simply strap on a heart rate monitor (HRM) around your chest and read the numbers.

Before you get started, I need to issue a really important, loud, BIG caveat. Not all HRs are equal. Some are faster. Others are slower. Why? Because some hearts are smaller while others are bigger. To know if your target heart rates are valid, you have to exhaustively determine your very own, personal, maximum heart rate (MHR). You cannot reliably predict it using the widely accepted myth that subtracting your age from 220 equals your MHR. That will only work for the lucky few of the human population who are right at or very close to the mean of the bell curve. Just like your running ability, your MHR may be found at any point on a very wide range. In the case of heart rates, there is a difference of 12 bpm for each standard deviation from the mean. So, you and another runner of exactly the same ability and in exactly the same shape could be running side by side and have HRs differing by as much as 72 bpm. That’s about as likely as winning the lottery. But variations of smaller, but significant, ranges are common.

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To determine your MHR, you can get a maximal cardiac treadmill stress test at a clinic. If you’re comfortable with a bit more ambiguity, however, keep checking your pulse at the end of each repeat during really long, hard interval workouts. Or wear a monitor and remember to check it as you cross the finish line of 5K and 10K races in warm weather. Through experiments like these, you can determine if your MHR is over or under the mean. If it is significantly off what the venerable old 220 minus age predicted, don’t worry. Your MHR has nothing to do with how good looking, smart, rich or, most importantly, how fast you are.

You can now be relieved if you ever calculated target HRs based on the age-adjusted formula and found that they simply didn’t make sense. If, for example, you have had to sprint on your easy days in order to elevate your HR into your 60 to 70 percent zone. Or were barely jogging on your tempo runs in order to keep your HR down within the 80 – 85 percent effort zone. Or, instead of huffing and puffing doing speed work at a specified HR percentage, you realized that you could have out-talked Dick Vitale? As a result, is your HR monitor now on a shelf gathering dust? Or did you get so frustrated that you threw it on the floor and jumped up and down on it?

Well, sorry about that. You needn’t have experienced all that frustration after all. There is still hope that you can find the valid numbers to objectively help wise, old Judge Effort. Maybe he’ll find out that you really are mentally tough enough, and, as coach Ed Mather used to say, "Good looking enough for all practical purposes."

Coach Roy Benson, MPE in Exercise Physiology, has been a distance running coach for 44 years.

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